LinkedGov is a community effort; we are pulling together everyone’s contributions to make government data more useful and more accessible.

To make this work for the entire open data community (including all of government and the public sector, technology developers, researchers, statisticians and entrepreneurs), we have agreed these principles for building LinkedGov:

We are leaving things as open as possible for experts to improve upon it (e.g. code, standards, etc.)

We are making LinkedGov more attractive than any alternative for cleaning data, as an incentive to use it.

We are engaging as many experts as possible in their own areas. We are also making it easy for them to get involved and help.

We are involving as many of our core stakeholders as possible, to give them a sense of ownership. This should encourage them to participate in the future.

We are assimilating existing technologies and programmes where they are adding value and not threatening LinkedGov in the long run. (In other words, we aren’t here to compete.)

Our main purpose is to create cleaner, more usable public data. All our decisions should support this.

We are doing things once and only once wherever possible. (Leaving a trail, comment our code, sharing our work and learning with the community.)